With the advent of the information age, communication systems and end user devices have increased in complexity as the number of users and the variation in user content being communicated has grown. As a result, different technologies have been developed to provide different types of communication data. In particular, due to the seemingly insatiable demand for video, wired and wireless communication networks are moving from circuit-based technologies to a greater extent toward packet-based technologies to transport real-time streaming media content. Since packet-based systems are characteristically quite different than existing circuit-based systems, there is an increased and timely desire to quantify and qualify the quality of the real-time streaming media content as it is delivered to an end device in a packet-based communication system.
This is in particular true for public safety communications in which the same content is transmitted generally from one end device to be replicated at multiple end devices. It is desirable to determine when and to what extent a particular responder received a particular group-directed message, both to enable technological improvements in the delivery process as well as to provide legal protection for the respondents. It may thus be helpful to recreate or statistically measure the receiving end user experience to determine what information the public safety provider received and when it was received.
Historically, mechanisms to facilitate real-time logging of digital video, voice, or other data streams in end devices has posed several challenges. Typically, circuit or packet-based end devices simply log the entirety of either the compressed or uncompressed media stream as it is received and processed. Both options, however, require significant amounts of available memory and processing capability in the end device. This ultimately makes such a solution difficult if not impossible to implement in most devices, which have limited storage and processing capabilities (e.g., portable devices such as cell phones, set top boxes, or radios). Additionally, given its relatively large memory footprint, the resultant data is difficult to organize, collect, and maintain when being uploaded to an external storage device. While this is problematic for transmissions to a single receiving end device, it is amplified in one-to-many systems such as public safety systems, in which a single source stream may be logged in its entirety in N different locations. Further, the act of later uploading the largely-duplicative logged data to a central repository will, in some circumstances, put a strain on system resources.